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Binoy Kampmark
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Binoy Kampmark - Latest News [Page 136]
Remembering the Kursk
Saturday, 14 August 2010, 2:06 pm | Binoy Kampmark
A moment to ponder: the cruel deaths of 118 men, who perished with their nuclear submarine ten years ago during naval exercises in the Barents Sea. The tragedy was compounded by that sclerotic response typical of bureaucracies terrified of openness ... More >>
Conflict Diamonds and the Campbell Affair
Thursday, 12 August 2010, 4:21 pm | Binoy Kampmark
One should keep an eye out for the provenance of precious stones. At least, that’s the message that has been cropping up in recent times with the war crimes trial of former Liberian leader Charles Taylor in The Hague. Super model Naomi Campbell is ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: The sexiness of humanitarian aid
Monday, 9 August 2010, 10:41 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The journey to work was characterised by cold winds, the usual dreary outfits of a dour morning scene in Melbourne, embellished by ‘Antarctic’ fittings. But as the sun peaked briefly and the traffic lights were about to turn, two bright women, ... More >>
Australian Packaging and the Smoker’s Party
Saturday, 7 August 2010, 3:52 pm | Binoy Kampmark
So, the wheels of history are moving back as the Australian election is heating up. What has made little impact is the startling announcement by a retail association to effectively pack a pro-smoking measure. The Labor government has insisted that ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: The Australian Federal Elections
Wednesday, 4 August 2010, 12:08 am | Binoy Kampmark
Another Australian election looms, and the incumbent government is intent on ritually disembowelling itself. Having deposed its own prime minister, the first Labor government to defeat the conservative Coalition since it was bundled out of office in 1996, ... More >>
Farewell the Netherlands: Leaving Afghanistan
Monday, 2 August 2010, 10:11 pm | Binoy Kampmark
One of the more accomplished forces in a rather unaccomplished conflict is leaving Afghanistan. The Taliban are gleeful and have even proven congratulatory – another force bites the dust in the graveyard of empires. ‘We would like to offer the citizens ... More >>
Blasting Pakistan: David Cameron in India
Friday, 30 July 2010, 4:25 pm | Binoy Kampmark
There was little doubt that the British Prime Minister David Cameron was playing to his audience. Pakistan was the convenient target of opprobrium before a gathering at the IT major Infosys campus in Bangalore. ‘We cannot tolerate in any sense the ... More >>
The Absurd in Action: Being Burnt by the Sun
Friday, 30 July 2010, 2:16 pm | Binoy Kampmark
In his second notebook, Albert Camus makes reference to the nature of love as a palliative to the absurd. In Burnt by The Sun 2: Exodus , Nikita Mikhalkov continues his epic story he began in Burnt by the Sun (1994) featuring the travails of General Kotov, ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: You’ve been Wikileaked
Wednesday, 28 July 2010, 11:50 am | Binoy Kampmark
Wikileaks is proving to be a gem of surveillance and discovery. Having exposed an assortment of brutalities, censorship farces, and government duplicity since its inception, the organisation has managed several information coups over the last few ... More >>
Russians, Babies and James Rabbitt’s The Clinic
Tuesday, 27 July 2010, 7:47 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The sea of drab grey and black sloshes back and forth before the cinema doors open. Another film event is promised at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which has already made it into the news because of the banning of Bruce LaBruce’s LA ... More >>
Shrill Busy-bodies and David Cameron’s Big Society
Tuesday, 27 July 2010, 7:28 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Could it be right? A Tory Prime Minister unveiling visions of a ‘Big Society’ that would redistribute power and initiative from ‘elites’ to the broader community or ‘the man and woman on the street’? Society had been the elephantine target ... More >>
Banning LA Zombie: The Aussie Way
Friday, 23 July 2010, 6:04 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Censors are paid to have dirty minds. The Film Classification Board of the office of Film and Literature Classification is being paid to have particularly filthy ones. A few little darlings, scant qualified to examine anything coming close to art or ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: The US Intelligence Colossus
Wednesday, 21 July 2010, 9:05 pm | Binoy Kampmark
‘The intelligence world,’ says claim the authors of a CIA document on collection and analysis of intelligence on Iraq, ‘is one of ambiguity, nuance and complexity’ (Jul 15, 2007). All the more dire then, that the US intelligence effort since the ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: The Case of William Jacques
Wednesday, 21 July 2010, 6:50 pm | Binoy Kampmark
People are imprisoned for an assortment of offences against the social order. These rarely involve infractions against reading books, or their acquisition, unless one so happens to be living in a state suspicious of the written word. But in Britain, ... More >>
The Moat ‘Execution’: The Reason of Force
Tuesday, 20 July 2010, 11:04 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It all seems grim. Some called it an execution by police forces. But the debate on Raoul Moat continues to rage. Britain’s most wanted man has become something of a poster boy of sickened violence, responsible for having shot his former girlfriend ... More >>
Spectral Duties: Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer
Wednesday, 14 July 2010, 5:36 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Roman Polanski might have been having his legal troubles of late, but that has not put him off his stroke with the screen adaptation of Robert Harris’s The Ghost Writer . It is impressive to see that Polanski, even under house arrest, can feed ... More >>
Matters of Opinion: The Sacking of Octavia Nasr
Tuesday, 13 July 2010, 1:21 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Where does opinion start and objectivity stop in the labours of a journalist? If we want investigative scribblers who are incapable of meshing value judgments with the material they come across, they might as well give the game up. There is, quite ... More >>
Matters of Opinion: The Sacking of Octavia Nasr
Tuesday, 13 July 2010, 12:11 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Where does opinion start and objectivity stop in the labours of a journalist? If we want investigative scribblers who are incapable of meshing value judgments with the material they come across, they might as well give the game up. There is, quite ... More >>
Vino & Vinyasa: An Orgasm of Life in San Francisco
Monday, 12 July 2010, 9:52 am | Binoy Kampmark
Yoga stretched bodies, taunt and in various shades of exercise, in a mocking show of entertainment, seeing how far their litheness would take them. Then, bottles of tart California Sauvignon Blanc gazing at their projected derrieres, ready to be ... More >>
Ways of Seeing: The Secret of Their Eyes
Friday, 9 July 2010, 4:42 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The truth of Michel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (originally À la recherché du temps perdu ) according to the critic Howard Moss is this: that reality exists within ourselves as much as it does, if not more so, than without, and that salvation ... More >>
